As our family rounded the corner to the White House library and I first caught sight of Sgt. Crowley’s lovely daughter; she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower lashes, and I saw my former self in her.

Now, can the 2 girls get a picnic-table summit with — hmmm — Michelle Obama? Let's begin a great national conversation about how women judge and maybe even hate other women. In the fourth chair — the Biden seat — Hillary! Instead of beer, various girlie drinks — maybe Focus Vitamin Water or something. Cosmos for the older ladies.

One shouldn't be surprised that a woman who grew up in privilege, interned at Vogue, and writes regarding fashion for Tina Brown's Daily Beast website would be uncomfortable around those that come from a lesser socioeconomic background.

After you pluck your eye out so you can plaster your eye socket with eye liner (so THAT'S why they call it 'eye liner' !) do you have to shove really hard to get your eye to go back in the socket, or is there some trick to just slide it back in there?

"You're so ambitious, aren't you?Do you know what you look like, with your good bag and your cheap shoes?You look like a rube.A well-scrubbed, hustling rube, with a little taste.Good nutrition's given you length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you?And that accent you've tried so desperately to shed: pure West Virginia.What is your father, dear? ls he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp?How quickly the boys found you.All those tedious, sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars, while you could only dream of getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the way to the FBl.

Actually, I thought this was much worse than the simply catty eyeliner jab:

This wasn’t a family raised on hate.

That was her instant reaction. Everyone knows white families are raised on hate! Especially cops' families! They're all racists...except the ones given a specific reprieve by self-appointed African American observers.

Ms. Gates doesn't seem aware that no one appointed her as Special Arbiter of racial prejudices. She's black. That's enough.

Never mind the elitism she displays. Her presumed absolution tells us everything we need to know about this world where white people are "guilty til proven innocent".

"Crowley’s cheeks flushed red as a smile dashed across his lips, and his young son, whose cheeks had long since flushed the same muted crimson, looked up at his father and smiled." This woman is paid to write?

JeffZ, yes. She is being cruel, she knows it, and she means it. At the same time, she has no idea how ridiculous she looks. That apple didn't fall far from the tree.

Most whites are clueless about how much racism there is among African-Americans. That's why white people were so surprised by Obama's listening to Wright for 20 years and having such a racist bless his campaign and baptize his lovely children. African-Americans couldn't figure out what the fuss was about--Wright's rhetoric is actually pretty ordinary in the African-American community.

There are virtally no whites alive today who had anything to do with creating the problems of African-Americans, nor had anything to do with the historical oppression of American blacks.

But the rhetoric that accompanies the cancer of affirmative action confers a huge advantage--psychological, economic, and political--on racism against whites. And so there is a large, now institutionalized interest in devaluing whites (especially white men). That is what Elizabeth Gates is participating in, however clumsily.

The Irish, Samuel Johnson said, are a fair minded people: they always criticize each other. The most barbed criticism of Crowley that I have heard has come from such as Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, and O'Donnell. Ethnicity doesn't trump ideology among Irish liberals. I suppose the up side of this is that the general population doesn't perceive the Irish as some kind of protective, monolithic bloc and that the Irish themselves are offered some type of reflexive insight into their own behavior. We Irish are no slackers when it comes to bigotry, but, at least, there is among us an awareness that we are capable of bigotry......Contrast this with Gates' daughter. Like every member of the black commentariat she can find nothing to criticize about her father's behavior. If a cop gets red assed with a member of the minority community he is branded as a red neck; if a black person gets red assed off the red eye he is hailed as an outspoken advocate for the downtrodden. Black leaders can't even find it in their hearts to speak out against Michael Vicks or Suge Knight, so I suppose it would be too much to expect Gates' own daughter to find anything cautionary about his behavior.....Ms Gates mentions that her father briefly became one of the 800,000 black men incarcerated in America. The underlying assumption here is that the other 799,999 are equally victims, like her father, of a racist society. Give me a break. In the wealthiest society on earth, a substantial number of black men choose violent crime as a way of making a living. And part of the reason they make this choice is that their educated class, their taste makers, finds little to criticize and much to glamourize in such behavior. When people like the Gates speak with as much ferocity against their home grown thugs as they do against a white cop, I will have a tad more respect for their courage and honesty.

Lucid @ 9:20 makes a real point. Until the mid-19th century slavery had accompanied humanity almost perforce. Lose a war, get ambushed, or have a stronger force march over the hill and you were a slave. It ended different ways in different places, but how it ended here, the Biblical seven generations ago, is 700,000 white boys were killed in a war in order to make 3 million slaves equal before the law (yes it hasn't proceeded perfectly but the goal has been constant and the ideal has never changed as we the people have held it).

That butcher's bill, in a population a tenth today's, equates to what today would've been 7,000,000 young men gone --and from a muscle-power agrarian economy to boot.

It also equates to one dead soldier for just over four freedmen.

I don't know of any other nation that did anything anywhere nearly like that.

For being an oppressed minority she certainly has a snooty view of middle class people.

My favorite part: her quoting her father as saying "You know, Crowley’s not a bad guy. He’s not a Joe the Plumber who wants to represent the Right. He would be horrified to be considered a racist.”

Notice he doesn't say Crowley isn't a racist--only that he doesn't consider himself to be one. And earlier he says it's "up to them to continue the conversation". One suspects that the conversation will consist of Gates lecturing Crowley about unconscious racism.

NahnCee, Ms. Gates is, if you reckon these things, at least 3/4 white. I detected no nap in her column photo.

But yes, LOL! Although that nappiness would have been innate, i.e. not-her-fault, whereas a 14-year-old's eye makeup is of course an accurate indicator of said child's wilful depravity. Or something.

Meanwhile I think the proper question about Ms. Gates is how many men has she slept with, rather than what she looks like. Her looks are really neither here nor there - that is, she looks kind of blah. I do not see the gorgeousness that a fashion writer should have.

OTOH, with all the Harvard men trying to turn B's into A's via the good offices of Prof. Skippy, she could have pulled a lot of trains in her time. I'm sure she tries REALLY hard, IYKWIM.

Paul --yep --racialists will say (because they must) that the Civil War sacrifice made is the 'old outdated past' and yet they say this to serve a psychological zeitgeist that predates that event --indeed, that caused that event.

As if it had never happened, as if all the unborn descendants of the 700,000 had not been pre-canceled but were here today, living lives they might have had.

You know, I'm beginning to re-think this. At first, I took her comment to be nothing more than knee-jerk, thoughtless racism...a presumption that most white families are "raised to hate".

But now I think she was using what my sister and I call "the Gangsta Tactic". She dropped those lines in there to boost her street cred.

It's that rude, crude, disdainful lack of respect for social mores. Or DISSING. It's blacks calling one another the N-word...simply because they CAN, as a way of emphasizing whites CAN'T. Given her need for "cred", I now think her father may have done the same. I knew from the start he wasn't really afraid of Crowley, thinking he was just doing that black thing of inserting race into everything. But perhaps it was conscious: his dissing Crowley would give him cred in the black community (and among the liberal elites). He saw this as an opportunity!

I've noticed in the last few years that liberal whites have started using the same tactic, especially to excuse breaches of political protocol. It's little things. Obama charging the businessmen for their lunch. The newly-elected Senator Webb accepting a Christmas party invite, then refusing to shake Pres Bush's hand when he got there...and openly bragging about it to the press.

Little thuggish things like that. Act out toward whites (or conservatives) in such a coarse,oafish, offensive way that it shuts down the other person. If they complain, they "ain't cool". I think I see a hint of Alinsky here. But my mind has a hard time wrapping itself around the concept of being bound by no social norms whatsoever. Of course, that means I'm just too "provicial".

Anyway, I'm now convinced Ms. Gates felt her culture required her to put those little disses in there. Otherwise, she'd be accused of "acting white".

Perhaps it is more a gender-specific-thing--and I just don't understand the import of the eye-liner comment, but I think you misrepresent the character of Ms. Gate's description of the Crowley family.

Actually, I think it is just fine and a highpoint, actually.

On the other hand, like some of the other commenters, I think she gives away her hand in some other places.

Worst of all is this last paragraph:

Discrimination is the single greatest wound in American history and could never be solved over a beer. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. There are more black men in prison than in college and literally thousands of black men are arrested across this country each day. And while I might agree with the president’s initial statement that the “Cambridge Police Department acted stupidly,” my father is not the first nor will he be the last black man to be arrested for no reason—in his own home or elsewhere—and Sergeant Crowley isn’t the first officer to fudge a police report. They are simply pawns in the rebirth of unfashionable intolerance in a world that likes to think our dashing brown-skinned 44th president has emerged to make nice with the past, present, and future. It’s an impossible task for the president and speaks more to our nation’s vulnerable value system than the unfortunately common situation my father and the Cambridge police found themselves embroiled in. As my father said on the plane yesterday morning on our way to the White House, “there are approximately 800,000 black men in prison and on July 16, 2009, I simply became one of them.”

Tell me, grasshoppers, after months of seeing an american flag used as a limp logo hung up behind streams of boilerplate-tolling government tranzis, does she, the flag that is, Old Glory, look a wee bit different snapping in the breeze in this picture?

When does the insidious race classification expire? How many white/European ancestors do you have to have before you are not longer “African-American”. It is annoying to see someone from the ‘grievance-class’ on TV complaining about racism who is paler than my blue eyed son.

We keep thinking, "oh how foolish of all these overly zealous anti-racism hysterics, can't they see they are creating a backlash, and causing a new form of anti-anti-racism racism?"

And then after a while it begins to dawn that maybe they know exactly what they're doing. Just like the Democratic party wants an economy that doesn't create too much private property (upward-mobility hauling off dependent voters as it does), the professional anti-racists want plenty of racism around to justify their livlihoods. So when we see this excruciatingly counter-productive behavior, it's no accident that we see it, that's the intent. Not a mistake, no error on the part of the actors.

When you feel disgust at the whole charade, well you're just performing on cue. Yep, it's crazy-making alright, and difficult not to bite.

...meanwhile, back in the world's eyes, while our elegant leader's lean frame lounges languidly in the rose garden legitimizing the race-hustle industry over a beer or two, a hard, vigorous belligerent adversary dives to the bottom of the world's deepest lake, legitimizing an altogether different sort of industry (exploration of the natural world, in an exemplary zest-for-life adventure).

You get a big read off that, Buddy? It seems of no particular significance in and of itself. A message on exploit of Uunderwater resources as in the Arctic, that prior contretemps or foofaraw that went around?

Unless you think that Putin is heroizing a future fleet of power-mad Navy divers with super-suits that will create Cold War-style "diving gap," or showing balls by subjecting himself to a nonzero risk of pointless death, or trying to make some symbolic amends for Russia's loss of the Kursk with all hands while he vacationed on the beaches of Sochi.

He apparently likes thrill rides. Not for space yet, he says, there is work to be done on earth. Ah, the Dear Leader! The Little Father!

naw, Nichevo, i didn't mean to imply any design --just remarking on the contrast, as it might well appear to a furriner. Our metro guy arranging his turgid PC knick knack shelf, our antipodal rival hopping in a bathyscape and voyaging to the end of the earth.

They have quite a nationalist movement going over there, by press accounts but also by account of some Rus students of aquaintance here in Austin, and a subtopic of that is how unmanned has become their rival Amerikanski.

True, Bud, in Russia they like a man who seems like a man. Then again Sarah Palin would get more respect from Putin than 0 does. I'm sure the White House would assure you that all this is irrelevant because, of course, the US and Russia are not in competition. (Bollocks!)

And if they were, I'm sure 0bama would never dare to tread on Putin's shadow. It would be rude.

I have no love for Putin, not at all, but I do think he is probably trying very hard to serve Mother Russia, and probably he is playing out a losing hand quite well. After Bush, what must he think of this guy?

(Oh yeah, lefties, now is your chance to tell us that Putin thinks Obama is so much better and smarter and nicer than GWb that everything will be fine. Uh-huh. Yep. Sure.)